How Marvel successfully unified its movie universe

In the midst of the massive geek Mecca that is San Diego
Comic-Con, the big Marvel Studios movie panel had all the theatre
of a presidential campaign rally. Tom Hiddleston appeared in
costume as Loki, the bad guy from Thor, and rallied the
crowd in character. Then: so many movie stars, including the full
casts of the upcoming Captain America sequel and
Guardians of the Galaxy. And just when it seemed like it
was over, Joss Whedon, patron saint of nerds, walked out for a
Steve Jobsian one-more-thing and introduced the first teaser for
The Avengers sequel. Eight thousand fans, some of whom had
been waiting in line since the night before, shrieked like their
souls were being ripped from their bodies.

Back in 2006, the very first Marvel Studios panel didn't have
quite the same swagger. Iron Man director Jon Favreau was
there, and it was like, the Swingers guy? Louis Letterier was
insisting his version of the Hulk would wash away the arty
taste of Ang Lee's earlier version, while Edgar Wright promised
Ant-Man, like he always does. In the middle of it all was
the stalwart, relaxed studio president Kevin Feige, the man with a
production credit on just about every movie and TV show with a
Marvel character for the last 13 years.

Inevitably, a fan stood up and asked whether any of the Marvel
characters might cross over into each others' movies, the way they
often do in the comic books. "Who knows?" Feige answered. "This is
a big new experiment for Marvel. But it's no coincidence that we
have the rights to Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Cap-" and the crowd
started to cheer that soul-tearing cheer. That moment, Feige later
recalls, was when he started thinking that he could build a series
of interrelated movies, the cinematic equivalent of what comics
nerds call "continuity." He wanted do something that only comic
book villains ever think they can get away with: build a
universe.

Feige's-and Marvel's-subsequent success is about more than
fanboy and fangirl dreams, however. Comic book superheroes are
intellectual property, and the Walt Disney Company, Marvel's
corporate parent, takes the profit potential of this universe very
seriously. And just as Disney owns Marvel, Time Warner owns
Marvel's chief competitor DC, home of a whole other roster of
heroes like Superman, Batman, and the Flash. Movies based on DC
comics have a spotty record; there's The Dark Knight,
sure, but you also have Superman Returns, Green Lantern,
Watchmen, and a litany of failures-to-launch with Wonder
Woman. Which brings us back to this year's Comic-Con, where
director Zack Snyder orchestrated his own bit of theatre at the
Warner Bros. panel by announcing his follow-up to Man of
Steel: a crossover between Superman and Batman that will be
the first step to creating a shared DC film universe culminating in
an epic team-up, Justice League. So now the question isn't "How
does Kevin Feige ride herd over a collection of interrelated
comic-book movies?" The better question is, "Can anyone else?"

Back in the days before everyone knew to stick around through
the credits of a superhero movie for an extra scene, Samuel L.
Jackson showing up at the end of Iron Man was nothing more
than an Easter egg, a joke for the faithful. It was no different
than the time George Clooney's Batman wisecracked that disobedient
sidekicks were the reason Superman works alone (a thing that
actually happened in a real movie). Feige changed that.

When Favreau's Iron Man became a hit, the Jackson cameo
at the end and a few other Easter eggs became the key to a new kind
of franchise, a movie universe that had architecture. "I could
arguably say what we're planning for the year 2021," Feige told
WIRED. "Will that happen? I don't know. But what we planned for
2015 in 2006 is happening."

Since its inception Marvel always had a tighter continuity than
DC, but that doesn't mean the movies had to work that way. For
years, in fact, they didn't. The X-Men and the Fantastic Four were
contracted to Fox, and Spider-Man to Sony. Under that structure,
those characters would never meet. When Marvel became an
independent production company in 2009, though, it retained the
rights to many of the other characters with less recognition among
non-fans and even casual readers. Once Iron Man proved
that Marvel could take one of those B-grade heroes and turn him
into a hit, the company could try to translate the formula to
others.

When Feige went to Favreau with the idea of a scene with Jackson
as Nick Fury, trying to queue up a movie that wasn't a sequel was
foreign. Now writers and directors know what they're getting when
they come to Marvel. "They had a very clear idea when we came to
the table. They had a good draft of the script," says Anthony
Russo, who with his brother Joe is directing Captain America:
The Winter Soldier. "They had a very good idea of what they
needed and they gave us what we needed."

In this case, say the brothers, that means they've been
allowed-even encouraged-to make their Captain America into a
1970s-style political thriller, very different from the first
movie's 1940s war-film vibe. Joe name-checks The Parallax View,
Three Days of the Condor, and All the President's Men
as inspirations. But that's stylistic; the story comes straight
from the comics, specifically a recent, terrific run by writer Ed
Brubaker. The Russos even consulted directly with Brubaker to get
it right, they say.

So where does Feige fit in? In a universe with architecture,
he's the architect. His deep knowledge of Marvel arcana helped make
him an associate producer on the first X-Men movie, and since then
his ability to translate that comic book knowledge into something
useful to filmmakers, though, has proven nothing short of (ahem)
uncanny. "Disney has allowed us to be a relatively small,
tight-knit brain trust," Feige says. "These billion-dollar ventures
come down to 10 people or fewer in a room saying, 'You know what
would be cool?'"

Feige is coordinating at least a half-dozen films in various
stages of production, making sure their individual arcs serve the
overall direction. He can offer writers solutions from the Marvel
MacGuffin file. (Cosmic Cube? Howling Commandos? Destroyer armor?)
He sees costume and makeup tests. He regularly consults with a few
writers working at the comic company, but aside from Brubaker, the
Russos never talked to them. That was Feige's job. "The comics side
has input, but it's filtered through Kevin Feige," says Anthony
Russo.

"Kevin is a genius," says Joe. "The guy is an auteur producer.
There's nobody quite like him in the business right now," said Joe.
And if Feige and the studio needed their movie to connect certain
dots that would tee up Avengers 2? That was fine by the Russos.

Feige has had good luck with finding directors with visions big
enough to make a movie work but not so big that they wouldn't
subsume pieces into a larger puzzle. The universe that Feige
oversees is, like the real universe, expanding. The next non-sequel
to come from the studio is Guardians of the Galaxy,
roughly the opposite of a recognisable comic book or fan favorite.
"It has a small, rabid fan base," Feige says, potentially
overestimating both its size and its disease status. But that
doesn't matter-Marvel isn't making Guardians because the fans
demanded it. "Five years ago, looking at our plan, we knew that if
Avengers was going to work, the movies had to stand alone," he
says. "Now we have to prove to the studio that we're more than just
these five characters, these five franchises."

Guardians does that by opening up a new corner of Marveldom.
Thor and even Avengers both teed up a space-opera,
science-fictional set of stories. If they work, that opens the door
to other space-based heroes like Nova and Captain Marvel. (Not the
one who says "Shazam!" That's DC. The Marvel one is a woman.)
Eventually the purple dude introduced in the teaser at the end of
Avengers, a universe-destroying Big Bad named Thanos, could even
show up and unite both the Avengers and the Guardians. Good luck
fitting that panel onto the stage at Hall H.

And if Guardians fails and Marvel's space stories fall down a
black hole? The studio reportedly wants to push into the
psychedelic, magical parts of the canon with a movie about the
sorcerer Doctor Strange, another character with a supporting cast
big enough to fill another team-up. (Defenders! There, I said
it.)

Feige makes it look so easy that it's easy to wonder, well, why
don't the DC movies do the same thing? On television, the DC
universe actually had a consistent continuity from 1992 to 2006,
thanks to a series of wonderful cartoons sprung mostly from the
minds of Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. But in the bigger-stakes world
of movies, while director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy was a
success (and good), it didn't even attempt to connect to anything
outside itself. Nolan intentionally made his Batman the weirdest
thing in an otherwise realistic world; it's arguably the case that
the biggest flaw in Dark Knight Rises was Bane, a
character who kind of sort of had superpowers.

Nolan, as executive producer on Snyder's Man of Steel,
could presumably have inserted Marvel-style Easter eggs into that
movie-a mention of Wayne Enterprises along with the Lexcorp
references, let's say, or someone wondering why the military didn't
call in that guy with the magic green ring. But nope. There weren't
any.

DC's Green Lantern tried it with Angela Bassett's
character Amanda Waller, who has a connective-tissue role in the DC
universe similar to Nick Fury's in Marvel. Which makes Green
Lantern an object lesson in what would have happened if Iron
Man flopped: nothing. We all move on. Nothing to see here. No
bigger universe.

Ask Feige what makes his particular kind of world-building
possible and he says, simply, "have a plan." It doesn't have to be
set in stone, he adds. His current estimate is that Marvel movies
have been three-quarters plan and 25 percent bob-and-weave.

Ask the folks at DC and Warner Bros. who's making that plan for
them, and the answer is … not forthcoming. It could be Diane
Nelson, president of DC Entertainment, the Los Angeles-based shop
the company set up to push into Hollywood. Though Nelson, who
handled the Harry Potter properties before coming on board at DC in
2009, isn't a long-time comic book nerd like Feige.

It could be Geoff Johns, a comic book writer with a Hollywood
background (who fans and some movie folks say was influential in
the Green Lantern movie's dive into superfluous comic book
backstory). It could be Nolan, even though he hasn't indicated any
desire to do it. It could be Snyder, who loves comics but made a
movie where Superman let tens of thousands of people die in
Metropolis while punching an invulnerable dude. (Just saying.)

DC declined to participate in this story, and representatives
wouldn't say who, if anyone, was overseeing the broader DC
cinematic universe to come. The company has announced that after
Snyder's Batman-Superman movie, it'll make one about the Flash, and
then Justice League. The Flash is also slated to appear on the CW
television series Arrow, though DC hasn't said whether it'll be the
same version of character. And since Christian Bale has said he
won't play Batman again, the movie seems likely to be a reboot,
especially because Snyder seems to be taking his inspiration from
the dystopian future Batman comic The Dark Knight Returns,
where a sixtysomething Batman comes out of retirement and
ultimately fights Superman. That's the kind of team-up that could
make joining the Justice League together awkward.

None of that means those movies will be bad. Broadly, Warner
Bros. as a studio has a reputation for hiring directors at the top
of their game and letting them execute a singular vision. But that
also makes it a bit harder to ask them to mention the same
paramilitary spy organisation that's in all these other movies over
here, if they wouldn't mind? Regardless, it'll be difficult for
Warner Bros. to start making movies that take place in a shared
universe, simply because they haven't done it yet.

"The rules of the game have been the same for us since we became
Marvel Studios, and everybody knows when they sign up to play in
our sandbox, those are the rules," says Feige. "My only guess is,
at Warner Bros., that would be a change of the rules. But I think
they're changing the rules right now over in Hall H."

As for whether DC will be able to achieve success in a sandbox
of their own, Anthony Russo seems skeptical, if only because
Marvel's own man with a plan won't be involved. "This has all come
together on the shoulders of Kevin Feige," says Anthony. "I don't
know if others can do it."

His brother Joe is a little more sanguine. "What's great is that
Zack is doing it, and there's a continuity there," he says. "You
need a creative voice to pull a thread through these films." Nobody
questions Snyder's bona fides as a creator with a vision. Still,
though-maybe Warner Brothers should consider a little judicious
recruiting from their competitors.